5 Jul 2014

Twitter is being a bit of a twit. I was tweeting a link to a very short domain and Twitter thought it would be a good idea to use its automatic URL shortener which in fact produced a longer URL! How dumb is that?

I typed in http://owl.uk which is 13 characters and Twitter replaced it with http://t.co/jLQcgAzbqX which is 22 characters. That’s 9 characters longer. What a waste when you’re only give 140 chars in a message.

The problem occurs in Twitter’s web client and also TweetDeck and I imagine most tweeting apps that don’t do a simple sanity check asking itself “is the URL the user types in shorter than the URL I can replace it with?”

I tried to contact Twitter to point this out to them but there’s no obvious contact information on their website. I was going a little crazy searching.

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About Me

Gary is director of Direct Path Solutions Ltd, and an avid web application developer, problem solver and technology nut. He's been using the Internet since 1991, built his first web page in 1994 and was editor of two national newsstand Internet magazines. This is a personal blog and Gary's comments do not necessarily reflect the official position of the company.